Journey out of the ghettos

PETER KOHN

ASKED how a journalist, versed in the here and now by the modern-day vogue of his profession, found himself wandering the byways of 18th and 19th century European-Jewish history, American radio broadcaster Michael Goldfarb speaks about “the story” — and the chase for it.

Eighteen months of research, that hallmark of great journalism, “was a big pleasure” for Goldfarb. “As a journalist, I felt as if I had a story nobody else had,” he says from London.

It was his enthusiasm for digging and discovering, which he sees as a trait common to both reporters and historians, that drove him to research and write Emancipation, the story of how liberating Europe’s Jews from almost 500 years cocooned in the ghettos led to revolution and renaissance.

Goldfarb’s 408-page tome, published by Scribe, traces the epic Jewish journey from the first stirrings of civic reformation in the Age of Reason, through the French Revolution, Napoleonic emancipation, integration and the Enlightenment, to the Holocaust.

It has brought the former London correspondent for US radio network, National Public Radio (NPR), to Australia to give lectures and to take part in two key writers festivals.

Goldfarb sees parallels between the exodus of Jews from the ghettos and the Babylonian exile. Both chapters shook Jewry to the core and brought about sweeping changes. The Babylonian exile led to the codification of the Old Testament, and liberation from the ghettos ushered in Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment) and more specifically Reform Judaism, as Jews grappled with ways to integrate into the new societies which, at least theoretically, had welcomed them.

The award-winning, London-based writer and former NPR bureau chief sees issues of integration and acceptance as a recurring phenomenon in Europe, with modern-day implications for Europe’s Muslims. He is hopeful that rising prosperity will erode Islamic radicalism and eventually bring about an Islamic “reformation”.

While covering Iraq for NPR, he befriended Ahmad Shawkat, a Kurdish translator who was murdered for publishing articles denouncing terrorism. Their friendship inspired his 2006 book, Ahmad’s War, Ahmad’s Peace.

As a producer of radio documentaries, Goldfarb is accustomed “to three-minute takes”, and he hopes this economy of style has made Emancipation a lively departure from the more scholarly perspectives on this period.

But there were challenges in placing his book with a publisher. “Agents feared a journalist as an author of such an historical work … they were concerned The New York Times would have it reviewed by a professor of history who would rip it apart.”

Goldfarb says he has tried to bring a feature writer’s touch to the book, lacing it with colourful figures, who lived through the momentous changes. He tells the story through well-known identities like Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein, but also includes those largely forgotten like Salomon Maimon, a passionate late-18th-century Talmudist who walked from rural Poland all the way to Berlin to breathe the air of intellectual freedom but failed in his effort to meet the great Jewish reformer Moses Mendelssohn, and Gabriel Riesser of Hamburg, who suffered discrimination in his youth and became Germany’s first Jewish judge in 1859.

Goldfarb, who has received the DuPont-Columbia Award, the Overseas Press Club Award, and British radio’s highest honour, the Sony Award, will discuss Emancipation at events in Perth, Sydney and Brisbane.